If you are a sales manager, business owner or long-time sales person there is no doubt that you have been witness to the Millennials’ methods in marketing and sales. They attempt to do everything on the Internet, including relationship building, link building and making friends and associates.

But as we all know these are not real friends that will be there for you when push comes to shove; oh, sure they’ll back you up if someone tries to flame you on the Internet, but they are not real friends, associates of guaranteed buyers of any of your products or services, well unless maybe you are selling some eBook or webinar something or rather.

Then, these same millennials call themselves relationship builders and enter the job market as sales people. But good luck trying to get them to cold-call or go hammer out a territory. No, they have their own methods like; doing a batch sort and emailing everyone with a form letter telling them about the great products and services and benefits and telling people to buy? Well, we all know that does not work, in fact, most people just delete those emails.

The other day, I was sitting in on a sales meeting as a consultant type of a very strong company. Many of the salespeople were millennials and as the sales manager went through the sales meeting identifying all the key prospects and the data associated with them that he gathered on the Internet. It was a waste of time. All the millennials had already done all that. Indeed, when they were discussing each high-value prospect and company. Each one would say, I already contacted them, I sent them information, I know them.

What they meant were that they emailed these prospects and prospective companies. In only two cases did any of the millennials pick up the phone and call any of the prospects they had carefully put into their data bases. That’s not sales and that is not a sales person’s job. The sales department should be doing that and the salesmen need to cold call, set up appointments, get face time, develop ‘real relationships’ and close deals.

What Works?
The secrets to getting millennials to jump is to offer them bonuses for each specific project based on the value of business that the sales department perceives that prospect to be. For instance, in the event of a high-value customer that the company really wants; the sales manager should say;

I’ll give a bonus of $500 for whoever brings this client in after physically meeting them.”
Changing the way the millennials do sales is essential to your sales dep